Center for Environment & Society
Rural Community Leadership
The Rural Community Leadership Program is a pilot program aimed at creating and sustaining local leadership in order to encourage and to maintain the rural character, resource-economy, and heritage of the Eastern Shore. The program seeks to produce a networked group of leaders who understand the region's special sense of place and share a common commitment to support vital and sustainable agricultural and resource-based economy through philosophy and actions that promote better planned development.
The program was initiated by the Washington College Center for Environment & Society in collaboration with the University of Maryland's Institute for Governmental Service, with the help of a grant from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. Additional funding has been received from the Maryland Sea Grant Coastal Communities Program and the Town Creek Foundation.
Grain Barging Feasibility Study in Cecil County
- Feasibility Study Paper (PDF)
- Feasibility Study Summary (PowerPoint)
Environmental Management of Enclosed Coastal Seas
Dr. Wayne Bell and Jill Brewer '03 traveled to Bangkok, Thailand to present at the Sixth International Conference on the Environmental Management of Enclosed Coastal Seas (EMECS).
The Setting
The rural character of the Eastern Shore draws thousands of new residents each year. The irony is that their new homes are built on land that once grew corn.
Agriculture, resource-based economies, and society are intimately related on the 6,000-mile Delmarva Peninsula, a truly unique environmental and cultural region that encompasses Maryland's Eastern Shore. A major agricultural area since Colonial times, the landscape is 53% productive farmland. The region's proximity to the growing Richmond-Washington-Baltimore-Philadelphia corridor has become a major factor in promoting land conversion to development at a rate that has made its farmlands the most threatened on the Eastern Seaboard and the ninth most threatened in the Nation. The region is also a component of the 64,000-mile Chesapeake Bay watershed which has lost 10 percent of its farmland to urban sprawl since 1985.
While recognizing human need for more homes, roads, schools, and places to shop and dine, the Eastern Shore's rural communities face increased pollution of the Chesapeake Bay and loss of their regional heritage as consequences of continued farmland loss, commercial resource decline, and sprawling development. The political economy is ready for transformational leadership whereby responsible and influential individuals raise the public's awareness and are, in turn, raised to higher levels of consciousness and responsiveness for the benefit of their communities and the region.
The Goal
The Center for the Environment and Society proposes to enhance the commitment of Washington College to a mutually beneficial engagement with the Eastern Shore community. The Rural Communities Leadership Program for the Eastern Shore of Maryland will produce a networked group of leaders who understand the region's special sense of place and share a common commitment to support vital and sustainable agricultural and resource-based economy through philosophy and actions that promote better planned development. Community engagement through this project will enhance the College's liberal arts curriculum by providing students with new opportunities to learn about issues in environment and society that they will be confronting in their potential roles as tomorrow's generation of influential citizens in their own home towns.
The Process
Rural Communities Leadership is a grass-roots, community-originated project. It will begin in fall 2002 with a day-long "grassroots forum" of invited representatives from Eastern Shore stakeholder groups. Participants will include community planners, businesspersons, farmers and others from the agricultural community, watermen, members of land conservancies, developers and builders, environmentalists, and representatives from community, state, and federal agencies. Professor Wayne Bell, project Principal Investigator, seeks forward-thinking individuals who are not content with a business-as-usual approach to the future of the Eastern Shore. The forum will become a sounding board for identifying persons to be invited to join the project as members of its Program Council (RCL-PC).
The heart of the project's pilot year is the RCL-PC. Its membership will reflect recommendations from the community forum, plus persons invited from organizations and communities in Virginia and Delaware who have had first-hand experience with similar challenges. In Spring 2003 the RCLPC will convene at monthly intervals to hear from experts and conduct its own deliberations on the following subjects as they pertain to the Eastern Shore: agriculture; economics; environment; community; tools and resources. In addition, the members will make at least one field trip to see first-hand how selected communities have confronted and resolved challenges similar to those facing the Eastern Shore. RCL-PC meetings and other related activities will be facilitated by Dr. Philip Favero, Institute for Governmental Service, University of Maryland.
The pilot project will conclude with a widely-disseminated white paper that will summarize the RCLPC's findings and recommendations and lay the groundwork for the first formal leadership class under the project's next phase.
Washington College's expanded engagement with the Eastern Shore agriculture community began in Spring 2002 with the new undergraduate course, Agriculture, Environment, and Society. Rural Communities Leadership will parallel a second course, Environment, Policy, and People: Sustainable Community Development (Spring 2003). The course will allow undergraduates to delve deeply into the issues being considered by the project and include special workshops that overlap with RCL-PC meetings. Washington College student interns will also serve as staff to the RCL-PC.
Finally, selected students will be invited to undertake rural community problems for their senior thesis and to present the results of their research to the RCL-PC. This program gives students more opportunities to get involved in their community. Rural Communities Leadership will be continuously evaluated for progress and effectiveness by members of a specially appointed panel of experienced individuals.
Grassroots Meeting
The first meeting of individuals interested in the RCL program took place in November 2002.
300 Washington Avenue, Chestertown, Maryland 21620 | 410-778-2800 | 800-422-1782